In Night by Elie Wiesel, what do you think are some of the most basic human rights that we should have as human beings? Why do you think these are...

The most basic human rights are the rights to simply live as one chooses, with regard to location, occupation, spiritual belief, and self expression. Peoples' rights are violated when one entity, usually an over-reaching government, attempts to use its power to control its citizens (or sometimes someone else's citizens), often for what it believes to be a good reason.

Elie Wiesel's Night tells the story of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew. The story is usually considered a novel rather than a memoir because Wiesel included some scenes that, although we know them to be genuinely reflective of the Holocaust experience, didn't necessarily happen to Wiesel himself. Even so, he uses his own name as first-person narrator of the story.

In terms of human rights, Night deals with the obvious: denial of freedom and life itself. The incarcerated Jews are torn from their homes, separated from their family members, and, in many cases, worked and starved until they die.

While the book keeps the physical torment of the prisoners forever present in the readers' minds, it is the loss of a different human right that affects young Elie the most. Wiesel's most painfully piercing comment on the Holocaust's devastation is seen in the victims' loss of spiritual belief. Early in the story, shortly after Wiesel and his family have been brought to their first concentration camp, the narrator says:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.
Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.
Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.
Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.
Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live
as long as God Himself.
Never.

Notice that he says that the flames “consumed his faith for ever.” Wiesel is introducing the idea that the Nazis have actually destroyed his relationship with God. The book will continue to develop this idea, as we see other characters also suffer a loss of belief, until, on the last page, Wiesel compares himself to the “corpse” he sees in a mirror's reflection--in other words, a person who has lost everything, including the ability to recognize himself.

So, while Wiesel does address the importance of basic human rights such as the rights to work and be with your family and live freely, he takes the idea a step further—people also have a right to develop spiritually, and this right can be denied by incarceration and torment.